MY CONUNDRUM

I have enjoyed my enmity to Marjorie Taylor Greene these last two years. She draws my contempt like a Confederate flag. She gives a poor satirist a reason to live. She is on the opposite end of the ranking that begins with AOC foremost, and culminates with MTG at the saggy-ass end. I will not miss her when she is no longer in Congress. I fervently hope it happens soon. There are other, equally stupid Republicans to stir my cynicism. Far too many, given their lack of integrity. 

My conundrum, such as it is, is that I have something in common with her. A reason to feel (yuck) empathy. One tiny thing few would know. For some a trifle. For her, and for me, somewhat more deeply felt. We have both written a book that few have read. We have both sat at a table, books stack to the right and left sides, waiting anxiously for somebody-anybody, to stop and look at the top book on the stacks. Dried saliva seals our lips, sweat soaks our armpits. "Please, please please, we think within our frantic minds! And then they walk on by, making a bee-line (and you know how a bee-line meanders) to the wine.

I know why MTG'S crowd doesn't buy her book: none of them read beyond a hunting or fishing magazine article. Most of them, I suppose, move their lips when reading. Add to that, Marjory Taylor Greene shows no indication of sparkling prose. She is a small string of lights on a poor Christmas tree. Without appearing to brag, she is the one writer to make me shine in comparison. It's a low bar, but I'll take it. Like deciding which of the Trump children is the smartest. Make no mistake, she would not read my book, and I certainly would not read hers. She might be fascinated in the experiences I write about, but the people who elect her, and those that fund her campaign, have other, lower ambitions for her. Being interested in a part of nature few will ever see on an intimate level is not one of them.

And so I am stuck. The empathy my nature encourages me to extend, is in conflict with the right wing  extremism I must abjure. If for no reason than the nature I experienced is threatened by the human existence of the wealthy polluters her party allows to continue. But of course that is not all. Everything she advocates is anathema to me. People who come from that end of politics have no respect for political norms-and thus, no restraint. They have no regard for the yin and yang of our existence. "Is this a net negative, or a net positive" is never a part of her political advocacy.

I must be content to to wish her a long life as an unknown writer. It would be even better if she had a long life as a political unknown. Sadly, her party, and the area of the nation that prevents us from being that great nation which we have aspired to, often tentatively, for nearly 250 years, has given her the soapbox she needs, and she does not need sparkling prose to achieve it.